Senator Solomon Olamilekan Adeola, the man Ogun State knows as Yayi, is not short of admirers. Without a doubt, as the All Progressives Congress candidate for the 2027 governorship race, he has the backing of President Bola Tinubu, Governor Dapo Abiodun, and the party’s Ogun West caucus. However, away from the endorsements, a quieter paper trail is drawing attention, one that touches his business past and, by extension, questions his opponents have already raised about his identity.
Before politics, Yayi’s own biography says he built a career as an accountant. He worked at The Guardian for twelve years, moved to the audit firm Olatunji Omoyeni & Co, rose to senior auditor, and then, in his words and in every profile written about him since, “established his own company, Sootem Nigeria Limited,” where he served as managing director and chief executive, specialising in tax consultancy.
That is the official story. Corporate registry records tell a slightly different one. A search of Sootem Nigeria Limited, registration number RC 391165, shows the company was first incorporated on 21 September 2000 as a Photography Service company, and then, on 27 February 2018, as Sootem Engineering Nigeria, with RC 1474389, in Egbeda, Lagos, at No 5, Ayo Oluyemi Crescent, Orelope Bus Stop. None of these list the business as tax consultancy at all. It is photography services and an engineering company. Its status on the register is simply marked “unknown.”
Company records rarely explain themselves, so a mismatch like this can mean several things. Businesses in Nigeria sometimes register broadly and later narrow, or expand, what they actually do without updating every field on file. Data aggregators that pull from the Corporate Affairs Commission can also lag behind the current filing. None of that proves deception on its own. But when the founder of that company now sits in the Senate and wants to be governor, the gap between what he says the company does and what its own paperwork says deserves an answer, not a shrug.
Then there is the matter of the names on the file. The directors listed for the company are Ogunleye A. Ismaila, Olaleye A. Oluwadamilare, Ogunleye O. Temitope, and Ogunleye S. Olamilekan. The shareholders include Sulaiman Olamilekan Ogunleye, Oladayo Temitope Ogunleye, Akolawole Olaleye, and Adewale Ismaila Ogunleye. Read the initials on their own and the pattern is hard to miss: four people carrying the surname Ogunleye, one going by “S. Olamilekan,” and a shareholder, Sulaiman Olamilekan Ogunleye, whose full name sits close enough to Senator Adeola’s own, Solomon Olamilekan Adeola, that the resemblance is not easy to explain away.
This is exactly the territory that has already spilt into open political combat. Wale Adedayo, a former chairman of Ijebu East Local Government, told Channels Television’s Politics Today that Adeola was “originally Sulaimon Ogunleye” from Ekiti State, and dared him to prove his Ogun ancestry. Several outlets picked up the claim, and Adeola’s camp dismissed the whole episode as a distraction; one ThisDay commentary called it a manufactured sideshow meant to avoid talking about policy.
Fairness matters here. Ogunleye is not a name invented for this controversy. Adeola’s own biography names his father as Ayinde Adeola Ogunleye and his mother as Abeeni Olasunbo Ogunleye. Ogunleye already sits inside his documented family history, apart from any allegation about a hidden past. A company run by several people bearing that surname, alongside a director going by “S. Olamilekan,” fits a family business staffed by relatives just as easily as it fits anything more elaborate. That does not settle the ancestry question Adedayo raised, and it does not close the gap between photography and tax consultancy either. It means the initials alone prove nothing, and that a fair reading has to hold both possibilities open until someone checks the Corporate Affairs Commission’s own file directly, not a third-party aggregator.
What’s left, once the speculation is set aside, is a plain fact: a company Adeola has spent years describing as his tax consultancy is, on paper, still registered as a photography business. That is not a smear; it is a public record, and it is one Ogun voters are entitled to ask him about directly. A man asking for the keys to a state’s treasury should be able to explain why the company that built his professional reputation says something different about itself than he does. Until Adeola or his camp addresses the discrepancy in his own words, backed by the actual CAC file rather than a spokesperson’s dismissal, the question will keep following him into the 2027 race, and it should. Voters don’t need to assume the worst to decide they deserve a straight answer before they vote.
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